Fleegix.org

Second Life drama -- tier increases and CopyBot

Posted by mde [ Thu, 16 Nov 2006 06:11:00 GMT ] Man, the virtual world of Second Life seems to be awash in even more drama than usual. That kind of virtual milieu always provides all kinds of opportunities for social drama between players, but this time it's

XDate: JavaScript dates with real timezone support

Posted by mde [ Sat, 04 Nov 2006 02:13:00 GMT ] JavaScript, as a client-side language, has somewhere between slim and nothing when it comes to timezone support -- it's pretty much limited to getting the offset from GMT for whatever timezone the local machine happens to be

Cosmo 0.5 released

Posted by mde [ Fri, 03 Nov 2006 06:23:00 GMT ] I'm excited to announce that Cosmo 0.5 is out the door, including all the Web UI code merged in from the Scooby project. The other biggie from the UI perspective is all the work we did

Arrays and instanceof with iframe

Posted by mde [ Fri, 27 Oct 2006 04:32:00 GMT ] When is an Array not an Array? When it's off in another window, apparently. I've just found that when you reference a JavaScript Array object in another window (in this case, in an iframe), the

Dojo 0.4.0 released

Posted by mde [ Tue, 24 Oct 2006 19:40:00 GMT ] Looks like Dojo 0.4.0 has officially dropped. I'm really happy to note that this release contains a lot of the date manipulation code I originally wrote for OSAF to be part of Cosmo -- so

XMLHttpRequest and 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) error

Posted by mde [ Sat, 21 Oct 2006 07:13:00 GMT ] I would have thought they'd have fixed this bug in Firefox by now, but I just ran into it again. I can remember bumping my head on this about a year and a half ago. I have

Typo upgrade

Posted by mde [ Wed, 04 Oct 2006 03:51:00 GMT ] What was an easy upgrade on my home machine running Ubuntu Breezy turned into a horrid, cruel, excruciating process on this Debian server. I was blown away by how smoothly the Rails migration went for the database (although Postgres

Update for JavaScript form serializer

A reader's comment on a previous post has prodded me to update the JavaScript form-data serializer in the download section to use the newer encodeURI so it can handle non-ASCII characters. Bye-bye, IE5 support.

Mighty Men & Monster Maker

I spent part of this afternoon showing my oldest boy (he's four) how to use my old Mighty Men & Monster Maker set. I just got the thing back from my older brother, who had taken it from my mom's place years ago to play with

Yahoo Ruby Developer Center

Posted by mde [ Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:36:00 GMT ] Linked from Reddit -- bask in the warmth of the Ruby love from the guys at Yahoo. Lots of links to other places, but also has some actual content like how to make REST calls to the Yahoo Web

Steve Yegge on programming for the browser

Some of it might be a little hyperbolic, but it's nice to see a post about what Steve Yegge's been up to lately . Settle down with a drink for this one -- Stevey's blog posts are not short.

Transparent PNG in the Cosmo calendar UI

Posted by mde [ Wed, 20 Sep 2006 19:44:00 GMT ] During a conversation with a Cosmo contributor, Jeremy Epstein, about the profusion of background graphic images used for the fancy gradients in Cosmo's calendar-event lozenges, he suggested the idea of transparent PNGs over a background color as

Tim Bray has some XML issues in Ruby

Posted by mde [ Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:37:00 GMT ] Leon Spencer has a lot to say about Tim Bray's posts on XML with Ruby. Oh, the humanity.

The new Ruby language site

The new site for www.ruby-lang.org is finally up, and it's gorgeous. At last we have a site that's beautiful and easy-to-navigate -- much like the Ruby language is. The site runs on Radiant CMS , which is (naturally enough) built on Rails.

MooTools library's Web-based download builder

Posted by mde [ Mon, 11 Sep 2006 09:15:00 GMT ] MooTools has come up with a really smart way to address the problem of JavaScript library bloat -- give people a Web-based interface to pick and choose which components they want for their download. It even lets you choose

Associated Content article on EpiphanyRadio

My Webcast radio station, EpiphanyRadio , is featured in an article on Top Free Electronic or Electronica Internet Radio Stations over at Associated Content. I'm proud to note that the EpiphanyRadio stream has been 100% RIAA-free for going on four years now. It has a pretty damned decent collection

Breezy Nihongo -- Japanese input in Ubuntu Breezy

Posted by mde [ Thu, 31 Aug 2006 21:49:00 GMT ] Instructions for getting Japanese input working in Ubuntu Breezy Badger are a bit different from the setup under Hoary Hedgehog. (I sure do look forward to this settling down one day soon -- maybe in Dapper?) Thankfully the Ubuntu

OSAF hiring a Web UI developer

We're hiring for a Web UI developer position at OSAF. This is a job working on the Ajax UI for the Cosmo project. We are looking for someone with some serious JavaScript/DOM/CSS kung fu -- and ideally some additional expertise, in either design or client-side app

Fake Steve Blog

Nice to know what Steve is really thinking. It's The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs . ("I love beautiful objects. I love creating them. Negative people upset me.")

'Jibe' vs. 'jive'

I figure it's about time for another nice, refreshing round of English Totalitarianism. Here's another one I hear surprisingly often -- people saying 'jive' when they really mean 'jibe.' 'Jive' has two basic meanings. One is musical: "jazzy music

HaXe universal programming language

Now that I really have a look at it, I wish I'd gone to this OSCON session. HaXe is a high-level programming languaged developed by Nicolas Cannasse aimed at use in Web-application development. According to the haXe site, it will compile to JavaScript, Flash, or to bytecode for

Multi-select for JavaScript form serialization

I just got an e-mail yesterday from Craig Anderson at SitePoint, letting me know that one of the folks who bought my book had noticed a small deficiency with the function that handles form serialization for the example code in the book -- the mellifluously named 'formData2QueryString.' (Man,

Second Life and avatars

This past weekend was the Second Life Community Convention in San Francsisco. I happened to be out at the OSAF office this past week, so I was lucky enough to be able to check out some of the festivities on Friday night, but missed Mitch's talk on Saturday.

DDOS spam attack on EpiphanyRadio

Nothing like a nice denial-of-service to end your day. Last night at exactly 9pm CDT, my server was hit by some heavy DDOS spam siege. This site (Fleegix.org), and my Webcast radio station, EpiphanyRadio , are on the box -- along with a couple of other sites. I still can&

Label placement with Web form elements

Amy Hoy's talk at OSCON 2006 reminded me of a really nice study I saw on UXMatters on that provides some emperical data to back up the 'common wisdom' for placement of labels for elements in Web forms. The study uses eye-tracking data to measure how